Constant Tonegaru

After the Romanian Revolution overthrew communism, Tonegaru's work became the focus of more public attention, and several accounts of his biography were published, including ones by his friends Chihaia and Chimet. In 2003, Cioculescu edited another volume of his friend's selected works, titled after Plantația de cuie. While periodic exhumations in Sfânta Vineri have made tracking down Tonegaru's remains an impossible task, he is honored by the Museum of Romanian Literature with a bust in his likeness, and, on the occasion of his 90th birthday in 2009, was the subject of a special exhibit in his native Galați.

Implicated in a trial of anti-communist resistance fighters, Constant Tonegaru was sentenced to a two-year term, and sent to Aiud Prison, where the dire living conditions resulted in a severe lung disease. He died soon after his release, and was fully recovered as a poet only after the Romanian Revolution of 1989, largely owing to the care of his friends and confidants Chimet, Chihaia, and Barbu Cioculescu [ro]. Tonegaru's biography is often described as symbolic of the fate of his entire generation, which was decimated by communist persecution and prevented from affirming itself culturally.

Nevertheless, Cristea-Enache notes, the general public has since come to see the "mythological" Tonegaru as "a fantasizing poet" and "a tragic character". He was an immediate influence on his slightly younger generation colleague and Sburătorul poet, Mihail Crama and on Chimet's ExiL cycle of poems. Tonegaru is also seen as the mentor of Stelaru, Cioculescu, and Radu Teculescu. With ideological changes within Romanian communism also came more tolerance of Constant Tonegaru's work by the cultural officials. A second volume of works by Tonegaru, titled Steaua Venerii ("The Star of Venus"), was kept in manuscript form by his friend Cioculescu. During a spell of liberalization under the new communist leader Nicolae Ceaușescu, Cioculescu published it, together with all of Tonegaru's known works, in an eponymous 1969 volume (accompanied by Cioculescu's introductory study). Nevertheless, his personality and writings were completely absent from the major dictionaries and anthologies of the 1960s and 1970s, including those edited by Mircea Zaciu and Ilie Constantin [ro]. Beginning in the 1980s, with the advent of the Optzeciști generation, Tonegaru was recovered as a cultural model, primarily recognized as such by authors who considered themselves Postmodernists. The Romanian poet's work has had its echoes outside Romania: Tonegaru is the subject of a concretist poem by Brazilian author Manuel Bandeira, titled Homanagem a Tonegaru ("Homage to Tonegaru").

In March 1949, he was arrested by the regime's secret police, the Securitate. The latter discovered his name while investigating the Bucharest connections of the armed resistance movement. Late in 1948, Tonegaru had obtained a Belgian Red Cross parcel for Teohar Mihadaș [ro], a poet and former member of the fascist Iron Guard, who, unbeknown to his benefactor, had passed it on to an anti-communist fighter in his native Bistrița. Caught up in the subsequent Securitate clampdown, Mihadaș was tortured until he implicated his connections. According to one account, the Securitate officers storming into Tonegaru's house treated him like a ringleader, and, having misinterpreted a piece of paper on which the poet had sketched out a piece titled Pistolul lui Werther ("Werther's Gun"), pressed him to hand in his weapons, and repeatedly beat him with a crop.

Late in 1949, he was tried in Cluj and sentenced to two years' imprisonment, which was reportedly a lighter sentence than expected. During the procedures, Tonegaru ridiculed the charges brought against him, addressing to his judge Zeno Barbu a promise that "in the future [Tonegaru] will strive to avoid the country's mountainous areas and will do most of his traveling in the fields." Tonegaru and his co-defendants were chained and taken to Aiud Prison, a facility housing much of Romania's former political and social elite. Using an adapted version of the Morse code which he would bang on the walls, Tonegaru soon found out that he shared confinement with writers and former dignitaries of the wartime dictatorships (Alexandru Constant [ro], Nichifor Crainic, Radu Gyr, and Mircea Vulcănescu), with sociologist and Iron Guard activist Ernest Bernea [ro], and with the National Peasant Party's Ghiță Popp [ro].

Tonegaru's activities brought him to the officials' attention. In late 1946, after Grigore T. Popa was forced into hiding, Tonegaru himself became involved in more clandestine activities, by organizing anti-communist gatherings attended or hosted by dissident intellectuals, such as Gheorghe Anghel [ro], Petru Comarnescu, Vladimir Ghika and Dinu Pillat. Suspecting that Tonegaru's home had been placed under surveillance, the Eminescu Association eventually decided to split up and keep activity to a minimum, while providing assistance to the more desperate cases. Soon after the communist regime was established in late 1947-early 1948, the wave of arrests touched members of the group, while Tonegaru continued to expose himself.

At the same time an anti-fascist and anti-communist, Tonegaru participated in culturally subversive activities against the authoritarian Ion Antonescu regime, and contributed to Dumitrescu's Albatros [ro] magazine until it was closed down by Antonescu's censorship apparatus. Before 1945, he was also affiliated with Vladimir Streinu's Kalende magazine, and completed work on his volume Plantații ("Plantations"), a large portion of which is dedicated to shocking images of war on the Eastern Front. After the Soviet Union began its occupation of Romania, Tonegaru was also an outspoken critic of cultural persecution, and, with fellow writers Streinu, Pavel Chihaia, and Iordan Chimet, created the Mihai Eminescu Association, a charitable organization and cultural forum whose goal was providing help to marginalized authors.

Following the Soviet Union's occupation of Romania, Constant Tonegaru remained an advocate of freedom, alarmed by communization and the start of political persecution. In 1945, having witnessed the onset of political persecution, he, Chimet and Chihaia set up the Mihai Eminescu Association, which functioned as a charitable organization providing funds for the marginalized anti-communist intellectuals and establishing contacts with the Western Allies. The project also involved Streinu and the French Roman Catholic cleric and Nunciature Secretary Marie-Alype Barral, as well as Todorel Popa's father, scientist Grigore T. Popa. During the same year, Tonegaru received the Young Writers Award presented by Editura Fundațiilor Regale, a prestigious publishing house, and, as a consequence, published his first and only anthumous collection of poetry, Plantații. It carried a dedication to his mentor Streinu.

In late 1944, after the pro-Allies August 23 Coup overthrew Antonescu, Tonegaru and Stelaru became dominant figures of a bohemian society centered on restaurants in Gara de Nord area, creating links between them and students of the Bucharest Art Academy. Sculptor Ovidiu Maitec, who was distantly acquainted with members of this circle, recalled: "One of [the poets] was in love with a female colleague of ours. Stories of suicide attempts. We amused ourselves. They would be around for a while, then they would disappear. [...] Back then, bohemianism [...] was the pursuit of liberation, of a splash of sincerity, and not total hypocrisy. Such was the need for bohemianism. Not necessarily that of a marginalized or impoverished type. They thought they were much freer, much more sincere, much more authentic toward their condition, toward their creation. There were charming guys, like Tonegaru or Stelaru, charming by means of their intelligence and spiritual games during nights of drunkenness, during which they would lose themselves, but would communicate."

Attracted into the bohemian environment, and having published his debut poem, Nocturnă fluvială ("Riverside Nocturne"), in a 1942 issue of the regional journal Expresul de Brăila, Tonegaru met and befriended poets Stelaru and Cioculescu, while frequenting the modernists at Sburătorul. His work became more experimental, and he came to concentrate on writing poems. Tonegaru also became better known to the public, largely thanks to the appreciation of his work by literary critic Vladimir Streinu, who also helped the poet find employment as a copyist with the Ministry of Education (a job he held between 1943 and 1944). He was by then a popular figure on the literary scene, and, according to literary historian Alex Ștefănescu [ro], loved for "his candor and humor, his awkwardness which always underlined his fundamental honesty". Among the young authors who viewed him with noted sympathy were Pavel Chihaia, Iordan Chimet, Mihail Crama, and Ben Corlaciu. He was also close to actor Tudorel Popa.

Constant Tonegaru, his friend Stelaru, Geo Dumitrescu, and Ion Caraion are seen as the main representatives of the World War II generation in Romanian literature. According to literary critic Daniel Cristea-Enache [ro], these writers "first look on wide-eyed as the old world is being dissolved by the Second World War [...]; after which they similarly notice, at their own expense, the birth of a new communized world, with other prisons, forms of censorship and ideological command." Historian Keith Hitchins notes the writers' connection to the "inter-war effervescence [through] individualism and aesthetics". This he contrasts with communist-endorsed "conformity", but also with the verse of ideological rival Mihai Beniuc, whom he sees as the one "authentic and refined poetic temperament" among the Socialist Realists of the late 1940s. The young bohemian poets were all influenced by Symbolism, from its French forerunners Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine to the George Bacovia, the last doyen of Romania's Symbolist movement. Their approach to literature was one of several distinctly new but short-lived trends, standing alongside the new generation Surrealists (Gherasim Luca, Gellu Naum, Paul Păun, Virgil Teodorescu [ro], Dolfi Trost) and the Sibiu Literary Circle, as well as the left-wing writers at Orizont review (Vladimir Colin and Nina Cassian among them).

He began his education in his native city, graduating primary school in neighboring Brăila, and completed his secondary education in Bucharest, at the Evangelical Lutheran Church High School (1931–1931), at the Saint Sava High School (1932–1935) and ultimately at the Libros School (1935–1936). He debuted as a journalist at the age of 17, when he had several articles published in Nicolae Iorga's Neamul Românesc [ro] magazine. His life changed dramatically after his father was convicted for a crime of passion, an event which also left the young Tonegaru in charge of supporting his mother, forcing him into menial employment by the Railway Company. Between 1939 and 1943, he was employed by the Romanian Post, 1st Bucharest Office.

Constant Tonegaru (common rendition of Constantin Tonegaru; February 26, 1919 – February 10, 1952) was a Romanian avant-garde and Decadent poet, who ended his career as a political prisoner and victim of the communist regime. Known for his bohemianism, he was the author of celebrated escapist and individualist poems, characteristic for the World War II generation in Romanian literature, and closely related to the works of his friends Geo Dumitrescu, Dimitrie Stelaru, and Ion Caraion. Together with them, Tonegaru stands for one of the last waves to pass through Sburătorul, a modernist literary society formed around literary critic Eugen Lovinescu.